A R T S & E N T E R TA I N M E N T
Re-imagining
the arts Artistic directors on surviving the present and planning the future
T
here’s no doubt that in the coming months, many performing arts organizations will be fighting to survive in a COVID-19-ravaged climate. For some local luminaries, though, the fight is not about merely survival; it’s about re-imagining the arts for the better. Meet four artistic directors who are working to transform the Midpeninsula arts scene. 26 • Info Mountain View www.MountainViewOnline.com
After the March coronavirus shutdown, members of the Grammy award-winning Ragazzi Boys Chorus created individual recordings that the group's conductors put together to create a digital choral performance of "We Are the Day." Courtesy Ragazzi Boys Chorus.
Kent Jue
RAGAZZI
A
chorus is a group that sings together. Almost overnight, COVID-19 made that impossible, giving choir directors a difficult choice: Adapt or disband. Within four days of the shutdown, the conductors of the Grammy award-winning Redwood City-based choral group, Ragazzi, took up the challenge of keeping their choirs alive. They created audio and videotapes to conduct singers they could neither see nor hear, at first relying on parents and volunteers with sound and video skills to transform individual recordings into a choral performance. “Along the way we produced three virtual choirs,” said executive and artistic director Kent Jue. Among them are a dozen graduating seniors performing “Shenandoah” as their swan song, and a group of 24 singing the rhythmic “Count On Me.” “None of this was a plan. It sort of just developed,” Jue added. “Once we learned we would have to cancel our season and be remote, we needed a project for the boys to focus on. We came up with these virtual choirs, which, I have to admit I was not a fan of at the beginning because there’s so much work on the back end and so much work on the front end.”
Courtesy David Allen
At the front end, the logistics involve creating instructions, collecting recordings and fielding questions. With boys as young as 6, that means parental involvement. Ragazzi estimates that phase takes about 15 hours, not counting individual singing time. For the nearly 140 separate voice recordings that went into “We Are the Day,” audio and video editing, all done in-house, took another 30 hours. Of course, it would be simpler if choral members could sing and record simultaneously on apps like Zoom, but the sound from the home of a conductor or an accompanist does not reach 140 other homes, or even half-dozen, simultaneously. Delays of a few tenths of a second from one place to another would result in choral cacophony. That’s why choir members Continued on page 27
